


'tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd

by givemebaretrees



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-01 22:47:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20265748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/givemebaretrees/pseuds/givemebaretrees
Summary: “I was the Empress’s Champion, you know.”The smoke from their little fire winds its way up towards the stars. For all that this place is the backwards countryside of Orlais, for all that it is damnably freezing and impossibly cold, and Michel does not think he will ever be warm again, sometimes he looks up and he thinks that maybe, he could touch the stars.





	'tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd

**Author's Note:**

> "To die—to sleep,  
No more; and by a sleep to say we end  
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks  
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation  
Devoutly to be wish'd."
> 
> —William Shakespeare
> 
> If any warnings are needed for this fic, please let me know.

“Stupid girl,” says the woman, to herself, the way that she always does, and Michel shrugs.

“The world is ending,” he tells her, and she shakes her head sadly.

“Poor boy, he doesn’t understand. It is now that Mother’s ring matters the _most_.”

He has traipsed all over the frozen riverbank, found a bunch of soggy journals by an insipid idiot who did not see that there were better things to do than chase some poor woman all over the hillside, he has watched the sky open up, the Inquisition is coming, and—Maker help him—he would still rather be awake in this hell than asleep.

“I’m still looking,” he offers.

“Do not worry about it. You have the demons,” she says, “Your sword is spoken for. You have a purpose. I would not distract you. There will be enough red templars when you storm Suledin Keep.”

She fed him, and she’d let him borrow some of her son’s clothing—gone, now, not ever coming back, she thinks—and in return, Michel… has done nothing.

“I really could,” he tells her. “I was the Empress’s Champion, you know.”

The smoke from their little fire winds its way up towards the stars. For all that this place is the backwards countryside of Orlais, for all that it is damnably freezing and impossibly cold, and Michel does not think he will ever be warm again, sometimes he looks up and he thinks that maybe, he could touch the stars. There are so many. Red lyrium glows in the hills, in the distance, and far enough away, it’s almost pretty.

She holds up a hand. Michel’s heart aches for her, it is so small and frail and pink. She must be so cold.

He doesn’t know her name.

“It is lost and gone,” she said, “Probably those bastard red templars took it—oh, _Mama_, I am so sorry—but I would not see another boy die at their hands. You would be turned into one of those things, you would be the soil of a crystal garden, and then who would protect this town from the wolves and the templars? Maybe even the Inquisition? They are soldiers, too… No, I could not bear it.”

There is no comfort he can give her, he cannot even be the Champion for this frail old woman, so he sits with her while she weeps, and takes her hand when it seems that she will let him, and when she goes to bed, he retreats to his little shelter, just outside the town, where the wolves will, hopefully, wake him up first before they get to any villagers.

He’s not so far gone yet that he wishes he won’t wake up at all.

* * *

_Imshael, Imshael, Imshael._ It runs through him like blood.

At first he thinks it is only the madness of his own guilt. When the guilt fades, and the name remains, he thinks it is more than that.

This must be what it’s like to be a red templar, he hears them muttering about a song, and there are times when he wonders if it’s lovely enough that he might as well go stand next to the red lyrium and try to drown out his own thoughts. It looks like it would be warmer than his little hovel, certainly. His song is a mockery of his own name, a garbling of the sounds that have always been him, for his whole life.

* * *

How is he to strike?

He tells the old woman of his plan. She shakes her head, and tells him how sorry she is for him, to be in this world when the sky is opening up.

“You are a good boy,” she tells him. “I know you have promised, but I wish I could tell you to stay.”

“I’m a bastard,” he corrects her. It’s figuratively and literally true. “I have to fix it.”

“You can’t fix yourself,” she says, sadly. “You should not have to die for that, though.”

He makes his first attempt under the cover of darkness, that night. He has crept before, through eluvians and through forests, through enemy camps. Surely a keep will be no trouble at all.

The fact that there are so many of them simply means that there is more noise to cover his entry, over the crunching of snow under his feet, the branches that he breaks in the overgrown courtyard. He makes it through the gate, sneaks past the sleeping giants in their cages, and—

Michel sees it first in the air. The snow holds still, stops falling, and then he sees a leaf, one of the last, desperate few, trembling in place. Only then does he realize that around him, everything is deathly silent.

He tests his own movement, draws his sword. No trouble there.

“Stupid!” says Imshael, as if his voice is projected from every single one of the quivering snowflakes around him, as if it rumbles up from the earth. Michel turns, sees nothing, turns again, and Imshael is striding towards him, down the stairs that Michel had been heading towards. “Stupid—_chevalier!_”

Michel raises his sword.

“You’ve made it easy for me,” said Michel. “You froze them?”

“Oh, Michel,” sighs Imshael, “you don’t know how much easier it is when it’s just you against me. You’ll wish you had stopped me from doing this. But I have to admit, I think you’re better off to me alive.”

He’s dressed like a lord. A thick fur mantle is draped around his neck, and tall boots, a tunic that’s hardly long enough to be modest. Michel is suddenly so envious that his chest aches. He hasn’t been warm in months, and Imshael looks _cosy_.

Imshael smiles at him. Michel realizes that, while the Imshael he had seen at first was a balding man with a goatee, this man is stubble-cheeked, and has a full head of thick dark hair. The wind ruffles it. Imshael is his own age, in appearance, and just slightly shorter. Something in his gaze makes Michel’s breath catch.

What did he mean, better off alive?

_Just him_, thinks Michel, _I just have to kill him_—_then it doesn’t matter_—

But time is frozen. Michel is paralyzed now, unable to move. Whatever magic has taken hold of the rest of this keep, it catches Michel now, too. A trap. Michel feels the fury building up. There seem to be minutes in between his heartbeats, but they’re so strong that they ache when they do come.

“Oh, your determination,” says Imshael, and there’s a little shudder in his voice. Michel feels it, through his spine. Something built up inside him, something released when Imshael breathes in, in between words. “Delicious.”

He holds up his hand, pauses for a moment, whips the mantle off his own neck and drapes it around Michel. There’s a moment of eye contact—Imshael has dark brown eyes, as warm and laughing as a courtesan’s—and there’s the brush of Imshael’s hands against his shoulders. The _worst_ part is the way that he tucks Michel into the fur mantle, doing the clasp at the front and smoothing his hands down the sides, quicker than a parry and more devastating than a perfect feint.

Then, Imshael holds up his hand again, and snaps his fingers.

Michel wakes up, on his bedroll.

Something tickles his chin. The fur mantle is still warm, draped over his chest like a blanket, and if he buries his face in it, so be it.

* * *

When he wakes up in the morning, in the light of day, he inspects it for flaws. The fur is thick, clean, with no mats, and for the life of him, he couldn’t tell anyone what kind of fur it actually was. He wonders if that speaks to its newness or to magical enhancement. In either case, Michel de Chevin is a man who knows the costs of fine things, and this, if he could travel as far as Val Royeaux to trade it (and not be considered a thief), would fetch him quite enough to live off of for the next few weeks while he plotted Imshael’s downfall.

He wonders what Imshael looks like to other people. Small, dark-haired… common, perhaps. Perhaps he’s nothing special to them. Does he make their breath catch, too? Do they see danger in his eyes, and do they want to tame it under their hands? Do they want to run their thumbs over the stubble on his cheeks?

Of _course_ they must, Michel reassures himself, but it is not so reassuring to think of Imshael’s words—not a desire demon, a choice spirit. The desire doesn’t _come_ from Imshael.

He takes the cloak to the old woman.

“It’s not your ring,” he tells her, and drapes it over her shoulders.

“What did it cost you?” she asks. “It is fine material. I will not complain if it came off the shoulders of a dead man, there is no blood on it. And it smells of—perfumes, not death.”

Michel didn’t smell the perfumes, but if she is happy, then he is. She gives him a small smile. It looks like his mother’s smile (though she is much older than his mother ever was). Thin, long past hunger.

“My lady,” he tells her, “it shames me that you worry about such things, but I know it is only practical in these times. You need not fear. It was a gift, one that I have no right to accept. My hope is that in presenting it to you, it will be rid of _my_ dishonor.”

“None of us are innocent now,” she says, and carefully portions out half of her dinner to him.

It doesn’t look right on her shoulders, but her cheeks are pink like she’s warm, and Michel is comforted.

* * *

The next time he sees Imshael, it is a bitterly cold night. It is so cold, in fact, that Michel has gone right back around to feeling warm again, which is how he knows that he is in danger. He should have found better shelter, but there isn’t any. He should light a fire, but he’s too tired…

“How sad,” says Imshael. “Poor little chevalier, shivering out in the cold. What happened to my gift?”

Michel lifts up a hand, one finger raised in a gesture. Surely Imshael knows it, even having been out of the world as long as he was. He cannot bring himself to sit up, but raising a hand is worth the trouble.

“Bet it’s not the first cold evening you’ve ever spent, wondering how you’ll make it through,” says Imshael. “Or did the alienage have lovely _warm_ slums? All those elves, crammed in together?”

“Talk about my mother, and you die.”

“Nothing wrong with wanting to go home. I myself have missed my own quite desperately. But I eat better here.”

Something shifts around Michel. It gets darker, and then, suddenly, he realizes that this is because something is blocking out the starlight. Already, it’s warmer. Imshael crouches next to him.

Michel can see his long eyelashes, the curve of his nose and the softness of his lips. The stubble on his cheeks.

He doesn’t know, at first, what to make of Imshael reaching for him. His hand is too high to be going for Michel’s throat, and his fingers tangle in Michel’s hair, grown long over the months since he has left his empress.

“You’re nearly blue,” says Imshael.

Michel should be nearly dead. The old woman will be sad.

“Why don’t you look the way that you did before?” asks Michel.

“I’d miscalculated,” says Imshael. His boots crunch in the snow. “You humans don’t like an air of… authority any more. You want everyone to be so handsome. I was out of date.”

“You might as well strip down and put on something filmy and sheer, then.”

“Well, sometimes my sisters had it right,” snaps Imshael, and then the fingers in Michel’s hair curl, not quite enough to hurt. “Oh, but don’t worry, I know you meant it. You _have_ been lonely, haven’t you?”

He can hear the smile in Imshael’s voice.

He is going to die here, he thinks, distantly, while a desire demon saps him of strength and bears witness to the second truth that Michel could not ever say. He has no question of what Imshael _knows_.

“You have to ask me,” says Imshael, softly. “I can save you, you know. However you like.”

“And damn me at the same time.”

Oh, he can almost see the smile on Imshael’s face without opening his own eyes. He can feel the warmth of Imshael’s hand, his nails as he cards his fingers through Michel’s hair. If only that were enough.

“_Poor_ Michel de Chevin,” says Imshael.

“Why save me, if I’m going to kill you when I get my strength back?”

It’s not a yes, not yet, and Imshael’s hand doesn’t pause. Imshael himself does, however.

“Why say yes, if you’re going to damn yourself when you do it? I get a meal out of this, you get your life. I do remember what happened last time I presented you with a win-win scenario, though.”

Michel groans. Imshael continues.

“Shall I remind you that you went with the scenario in which _you_ lost and _I_ won? Wouldn’t it be better to try something new?”

Michel opens his eyes. Imshael, in his finery, is sitting on the ground beside Michel, cross-legged. He looks comfortable, cheeks faintly flushed in the cold.

“Can you get me a bed?” asks Michel. It starts off facetious. “If I am to die or damn myself, I will be comfortable while doing it.”

He wishes they were not his words. Are a dying man’s words the truest, or can he plead insanity? Michel thinks, halfheartedly, to pretend that he is joking, that the words are an ill-timed, abominable jest. But if Imshael—

“Can I get you a _bed?_” says Imshael, disgusted. “By the _Maker_, you are an unimaginative man.”

Michel tilts over, then catches himself against a plush down mattress.

He feels warm, as though he’s never been cold. Once, Michel had needed to warm a man up, after a night out in the cold. It had taken hours, lying next to him under the blankets. The man had been weak for days afterwards.

Michel feels as though he’s had a good night’s rest, and could, quite comfortably, go through the most rigorous of training exercises. It is still dark outside. He buries his face in the pillow, and gasps.

“I took the liberty of guessing a bed that you _would_ want.”

It is like the sob that he hears isn’t even his own. He doesn’t know where it came from, if there is a place deeper than his heart inside him, the wail echoes up from the bottom of it like a child who has fallen down a well.  He _does_ know this bed, the smell of these sheets. He knows this room. He has slept here more times than he can count, in the Imperial Palace, when he was Celene’s champion.

“Now, you don’t _have_ to cry,” says Imshael, “though I will admit I’d prefer it if you did. But don’t you see? You could sleep like this always, if you were with me. I could keep you warm, and comfortable. Shall I stay with you?”

Michel turns his face. The demon swipes a thumb across his cheek, then licks the tears off of it. Michel buries his face in the pillow, and tries to ignore where his cheek feels like it is burning from the brief touch. He is so damn aware of everything he is feeling, and the worst part is, he knows he is suffering from no madness whatsoever, except for a folly which did not come from Imshael. The pillow smells like _home_.

If he is to be damned, he will see this through. He pushes himself up—Imshael has conjured him comfortable, light sleeping-clothes, as well, and Imshael himself is wearing the same thing, but made of fine silk—and very nearly falls on Imshael, but their lips meet, which is the point.

Imshael closes his eyes, and leans into the kiss.

“Humans,” he mutters, but he sounds fond, and at some point his hand slid up to twist around Michel’s sleeve, up his arm. “You want to make everything about fucking, don’t you?”

“You can stop me,” says Michel.

“Oh, the _chivalry_ of it all. I _brought_ you here for this,” sighs Imshael, and kisses Michel back.

Imshael lets himself be pushed back onto the bed, where Michel straddles his hips. It’s strange, how familiar Imshael’s body is, until Michel realizes he has been studying it every time he meets the man. His hips would be narrow, like so. No muscle definition, if Michel slides his hand up Imshael’s nightshirt, but he can find sensitive places, and he has half a mind to rip open the nightshirt and be done with it. He wonders what Imshael would do if he closed his mouth over Imshael’s nipples, and bit down.

“_Could_ you?” says Imshael.

…Michel is sure he didn’t say that out loud. He’s trying to formulate a response, when—

“Oh, I forgot,” says Imshael, “yes, of course, I can—to a certain extent—make a guess as to what you’re thinking. It’s images. Helps with offering people choices, you see. You were thinking about—just undo the damn buttons already—”

Michel is already following that order, already mouthing his way down Imshael’s chest, and Imshael sighs, tugs at the waistband of Michel’s pajamas.

If it is a performance—for who can imagine that a demon would be so affected, physically?—it is a good one, and it stirs Michel, or perhaps that’s Imshael’s hands. Under the rich red comforter, Michel rolls his hips against Imshael’s, Imshael’s soft uncallused hand working between them, until it is Michel whose breath is coming more harshly, and Imshael looks unaccountably smug.

“I can give you one night,” says Imshael. Michel grips the sheets, and fucks into Imshael’s fist. So this is to be it, then? His soul, for this? A handjob under a comforter, and an empty Imperial Palace? He can’t bring himself to care. “Here, I mean. Although I do have to admit, the way that being here makes you want things to be the way that they used to be is… _so_ satisfying. For me, that is.”

It would be rude to tell him to shut up, even if it is obscene, how much Imshael seems to enjoy Michel’s emotions at the moment. Imshael, with his free hand, caresses Michel’s cheek. It is unlike anything that Michel has ever experienced—it’s almost tender. When Michel comes, Imshael does, too.

“That’s right,” he murmurs. Michel lets his head drop onto Imshael’s shoulder. 

He dreams of a clearing, with stones in a circle, and rolling with Imshael in the grass. When he wakes, a lovely winter dawn’s light is creeping in through the windows. The glass throws prisms onto the floor.

“Hm? Are you awake?” says Imshael, 

Imshael runs a hand along his stomach. His touch is… it has the same effect on Michel, but Imshael’s hands are just wandering. They’ve curled up together, Imshael at Michel’s back.

“Do you ever think about why it is that we do what we do?” asks Imshael, and if Michel is growing hard again at the way that his breath brushes Michel’s ear, he has consolation in the fact that he can feel Imshael is in the same predicament. “Spirits, I mean.”

“To corrupt.”

“What a simple answer,” says Imshael.

“It satisfies you,” says Michel. The sound that Imshael makes in response to that should be obscene. Michel, despite everything, feels his face flush. “Not—”

“Is _that_ what you want?”

“You look inside my head, you know. You _know_ what I mean.”

“I _am_ a _choice spirit_. I want to hear you say it.”

Michel tries to summon the strength to be bothered. He’d wanted warmth, and, well, that choice had been easy. Imshael is sticking to him like a leech, they are tangled up in one another. Imshael smells like spices, like clean hair, like summer. Nothing has smelled good since he left home. He’s not sure that _summer_ is real, any more.

And Michel tries not to think about how his bedroll—so short that his feet hang off it most nights—is probably big enough for the two of them together, with Imshael’s magic, because this bed certainly was never this big when it was just his own. He tries not to think about the landscape of rocks that he should be feeling beneath his back, the downy softness that he _is_ feeling.

Oh, it could be worse. But not by much. He consoles himself with the thought that at least Imshael isn’t in Halamshiral, with the Empress.

“I am already corrupted,” says Michel, finally.

“That’s true, but the way that you say it is _adorable_,” said Imshael. Michel can feel the tips of his fingers at his sides. He has small hands. What would have happened if Imshael had appeared to him as a woman? Michel cannot say he would have wanted him so much. He can’t say he would be here right now. “So what do you want right now?”

It seems like it’s an important question. Michel should have an answer to it.

“Nothing,” says Michel, fighting the urge to fall asleep.

“Wrong answer,” says Imshael, and then, the warmth is gone. Michel opens his eyes, and next to his head are Imshael’s boots.

“Not so fast,” says Imshael, and Michel is pinned to the ground.

Ah, there they are, those pebbles that have plagued him night after night. He knows what he wanted, now. He wanted to stay there.

Imshael smiles.

“Oh, Michel,” he sighs, “with you, I’d never go hungry again. The things you want don’t go away. The more you try to tell yourself not to want them, the worse off you are…”

“That’s no reason to just let go,” says Michel.

“On the contrary. It’s the reason to cling to them. Better to have and realize you don’t want, than to want while you can’t have, don’t you think?”

There’s something wrong with that, but Michel can’t put his finger on it. When Imshael kneels down, and caresses Michel’s cheek, Michel doesn’t want anything beyond that. After a moment, Imshael is gone.

* * *

The shades descending on Sahrnia are exactly what he feared. They are Imshael’s monstrous form, flickering like candlelight, sheer as linen, and there are brave Sahrnians raising their swords, and a dwarven woman with a bow and arrow making pincushions of them. They are holding off the attack, but only just, and Michel charges in.

“You came back,” whispers the shade nearest him, Imshael’s voice, purring in his ear.

“You’re not here.”

“Who says?”

“You’re fighting the Inquisitor,” says Michel, but his heart is beginning to ache. Snow crunches on the ground under his feet, only his feet, not Imshael’s spidery form. He doesn’t know if it’s an inherent incorporeality or if Imshael’s spidery form is truly so light on its too-many feet.

“You wanted me to be here with you.”

“You don’t give me what I _want_,” says Michel, furiously—

Imshael laughs. The dwarven woman looses arrow after arrow into shades, which flicker into nothing. There are others trying to fight from the village, and still others trying to gather up the few villagers left, the elderly who couldn’t make the trip out or the sick or the ones who wouldn’t abandon their family members who had been sent to the mines.

Michel watches them fall with a sick horror._ If I had just…_

“Come _on_,” says Imshael, rolling his eyes, “You can’t be sorry for them.”

“What would it take to stop you?”

Michel buries his sword in another shade. There is nothing to distinguish it from the one in front of him, the one he cannot take his eyes off of, but he knows. He _knows_. He knows, and he can’t kill that one.

“The Inquisitor is killing me,” says Imshael, flatly, and then he—he pauses. A small boy sneaks into one of the houses. Michel sees him, knows that Imshael sees him, knows, too, when Imshael gives up that chase.

It is not tenderness, Michel reminds himself. It’s a lion, spotting a weaker target and abandoning its first.

“Come away from here.”

“What _ever_ for?”

“You’ll die here,” says Michel, furiously, “you’re stretched too thin, between Suledin Keep and here. Will you let yourself die, for those_ red templars? _Choice spirit?”

“If someone set a banquet out for you, in the middle of this hellish landscape, could you turn away?”

“I thought you were smarter than that,” said Michel.

“I just fooled _you_. That doesn’t take a genius—no offense meant to yourself, of course. How’s this: if someone offered you a warm bed, what would _you_ do?”

Michel reaches for Imshael. He does not trust his heart, but he trusts his hands. There is a horrible lurching feeling of his feet going up and his head going down, like he is a ribbon on a traveling performer’s stick, and then he is flat on his back in a clearing.

It’s nighttime.

There might as well be _nothing_ real, Michel decides, and he picks up his knife. He dreamed up this place, after all. The stones are his. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know what incantation made them in the first place. He dreamt them, so they are.

“What on earth are you doing?” asks Imshael.

“What I started when we met,” said Michel. He holds it over his palm.

Imshael, whose feet did not mark the ground when they met, whose clothes and demeanor are no longer that of a stylish man from centuries ago, who is much more recognizable as an inhabitant of Val Royeaux in this era, leans back on his heels.

Michel slices, and wipes his hand on the stone. It stings, as if this place were real.

“You _wouldn’t_,” hisses Imshael. “You’d be an abomination. You’re not even a _mage.”_

“Good thing, too,” says Michel. “Otherwise you’d have all of a mage’s power.”

His blood glows on the stone, in a marking that he can’t read, but which, strangely, makes him think of being the only structure in a vast empty golden plain. A grain silo. A tree, with a solitary nest in one solitary branch.

_You could kick me out_, he thinks, or perhaps says out loud, he isn’t quite sure. This is it, finally, what he meant to do. What he _was_ meant to do.

_I can still feed off of you this way_, says Imshael, but Michel can feel something else underneath it. Something buried in the center of his chest, a hook in the part of him that trudged across these Maker-forsaken mountains to fight the demon and protect these people. What was desire, anyway?

“You weren’t really a choice spirit,” says Michel.

“No,” breathes Imshael.

It tugs him forward, whatever it is between them that links them so. Michel feels strange.

“You can’t hurt them,” he says, “no more… shades. No more innocent lives involved. Just you, and me. A warm bed. We’ll find the Inquisition. We’ll—”

A shudder rolls up through him.

It feels like he is hungry, and thirsty, and bone-tired, all at once. Everything—every lack that Michel has ever felt. An all-consuming longing for someone else’s toy soldier, his mouth watering for peasant’s bread, his desperate wish to know what his mother would have thought of his taking up the chevalier’s sword, and Imshael, Imshael, Imshael’s hands, Imshael’s lips, Imshael’s hair in his hands, Imshael’s neck at the point of his sword.

Michel falls to his knees. He tries to keep his mind on Imshael. It’s not difficult. 

It’s like holding a mirror up to another mirror, and tilting the angle back and forth. Imshael, in endless iterations, moves in his mind. He watches the demon watch himself _watch the demon watch himself_—

“_This_ is what it’s like,” says Imshael. “It will be like this, forever.”

“Tell me something I _don’t_ know,” says Michel. A low laugh rumbles up out of him. It’s not his own.

“Unlike _you_, I can be satisfied,” says Imshael, and Michel wakes up, face down, in the snow. His palm is still bleeding, and the dwarven woman from the Inquisition is shaking his shoulder. He stares up into her eyes, takes in her freckles and her messy hair, escaped from its tidy braid.

He sees the woman he has met on a handful of occasions, whose accuracy with a bow he respects. At the same time, he sees a woman who is always looking at the sky, at the Breach, and whose every action since its opening has been in service of closing it. She misses her home. But she fights, anyway.

“Oof, thought we lost you,” she says.

He shuts his eyes to clear the double vision.

“Causalties?” he manages.

“That’s the weird thing,” she says. “None. All the demons just disappeared. I guess that means the Inquisitor won down at Suledin Keep, huh?”

“I guess so.”

He sits up.

“Be careful—you don’t know what injuries you took—”

“I am fine.”

He feels better than ever. He feels warm, and comfortable. He feels as though he has done all the stretches his swordmasters used to require of him. He feels as though he could run for miles.

_I am an abomination_, he thinks. Well, it’s been said before.

“If you say so,” she says, and shrugs.

He stretches out his hands, examining them, turning his palm upwards. There’s a scar there, but the wound seems to have healed. He hadn’t meant it to be deep.

_It was as deep as it needed to be_, says Imshael, flatly, but Michel hears the things that he doesn’t say.

“Let’s get you checked out,” she says, which means that he gets handed over to some Inquisition healer who finds—as he expected—nothing wrong. Imshael talks to him all the way through it, and Michel is glad. It has been so lonely inside his own head.

The old woman has survived, and Michel finds her among those being cared for, in terms of wounds.

“I caught him,” he tells her, because it’s at least technically true, and she doesn’t need to know the rest.

“That is good,” she tells him, quite seriously.

Looking at her, touching her hand, he does not learn anything he didn’t know before. There are some things that a demon’s talents cannot touch, and the understanding of a parent’s grief is one of them. Michel knows that she misses her son, and her mother, and her father, and every other member of her family. She misses Michel, too, on some level, because she knows he is leaving. He does not, he realizes, feel the desire for the ring.

_I could make such promises to her_, says Imshael, wistfully._ She would be happy, you know_.

_No_, Michel thinks, firmly, and then turns to her.

“You carry something else with you now,” she says. He feels her regard, the way her eyes travel over him. “You are not the boy you were.”

“I am something else,” he agrees.

“Did you fix it?” she asks.

He nods.

She closes her other hand over his, and pulls him closer. She kisses his forehead, a mother’s gesture, and he bows his head to her.

“The Inquisition has returned my ring,” she says, answering that mystery, and shows it to him. She doesn’t wear it, she holds it close to her heart. “They say they have killed your demon, too.”

“It’s lovely,” he says. He says nothing about the demon, and somewhere inside him, Imshael laughs. A warm feeling fills him, suddenly, both his own and from somewhere else, too. They twine together.

She looks at him one last time, and Michel understands that what he is feeling is her desire to protect him.

“It’s taken care of,” he tells her, but the crease of worry between her brows furrows.

_Let her think what she likes_, says Imshael. _Humans don’t understand these things_.

This is what it means, Michel realizes, to no longer be human… Well, humanity has always been a nebulous concept for him, anyway.

They part. She worries. He cares. They feel it in the other, and for his part, Michel appreciates it. He thinks that the old woman would say the same.

* * *

The thing that used to be Michel de Chevin goes east.

It gets warmer, as they get out of the Emprise. Soon, past the Exalted Plains, they’re in Ferelden. Michel knows the pass through the Frostbacks, and makes his way east still with unerring caution. It is peaceful, more peaceful still for the fact that there is not a wolf or a shade or a bear in these woods that could harm him. He wonders what the Inquisition will make of that.

_You don’t have to tell them_, whispers the voice in his dreams.

Sometimes he speaks aloud to it. Sometimes there is an answer. It is not a good habit to get into, they decide, together, but in solitude, it is a comfort.

When he lies down that night to think about it, he shuts his eyes and he still sees the clearing, except that there is a man sitting beside him, in traveler’s clothing. Practical, sturdy, but not cheap. He has dark eyes, dark hair, and he is laughing.

“I have to tell them,” he says to Imshael, who shrugs.

“_Such_ a chevalier. So honest. You’d let them kick you right back out into the cold.”

“Then I will find another village and fight off shades and demons, and sleep in abandoned shacks. You won't even notice the difference.”

“You can’t even think of anything new to do?”

“You wouldn’t want me to do anything else.”

Sometimes, Michel doesn’t even know who he is when he says these things, but he means them—they are a promise, as much as they are a taunt. And he doesn’t hardly recognize his stowaway, who drinks in his words like a man finding water in the desert. Michel is something else, something different from what he was, but Imshael is changing, too.

Michel cannot pretend to know what it is to have come from the Fade. He doesn’t know, really, what hundreds of years in this world did to Imshael, but whatever it was, Imshael seems to be in the midst of an undoing. He feels like something glowing in Michel’s chest. Together, they are a garden, and Michel does not know what is growing.

Imshael leans in and kisses him, and if this is the Fade, the log under their hands feels very, very real, as does Imshael’s weight on him, when Imshael throws his leg over Michel’s.

And if Michel is as happy to be awake as he is to be asleep, well. His sword is spoken for. The scar on his palm is only a reminder. He is not, and will never be, alone again.

**Author's Note:**

> "Wisdom and Purpose are too easily twisted into Pride and Desire."
> 
> —Solas


End file.
